Browsed byMonth: December 2016

My initial intent for this post was to elaborate on a concept that I found inspiring. Jörn Loviscach (http://www.j3l7h.de/about.html) had posted a demonstration of a “Poor Man’s Thermographic Camera” that consisted of low cost parts. It scans a scene and processes the visual data to create a thermographic image. The thermo cam consists of a pyrometer sensor (aka non contact ir thermometer), two servos that tilt mirrors, and mounting hardware. It acquires images from the reflection of heat by tilting…

Presenting visual data readings into an image file can seem challenging. It need not be thanks to the Netpbm (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Netpbm_format) file formats. First developed by Jef Poskanzer (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jef_Poskanzer) as a means of sending image data via email. The early adaptations of email did not work well with data other than ASCII. Messages would become corrupt if binary data was included in messages. Today, this is not an issue. However, the work around for this was to use one of the…

Here I’ll cover how sensors can collect readings from an environment and represent those readings in a practical way. The most common field scanning devices are flat bed scanners and cameras. These devices either have a line of sensors or an array of them to take readings quickly. Flat bed scanners typically have a line of sensors that detect light and color. As the sensors move along the surface of an object, typically paper, they buffer the readings into memory. …

How can measurements be made when you can’t directly measure them? Measuring the height of a building could be done by someone hanging a string from the rooftop and then measuring the string. What if you can’t get access to the rooftop? What if you needed to measure the span of a lake or height of a mountain? Good luck using that string. Here is how FOV can be used as a measurement tool for objects in pictures, videos, etc. …